Attention

By Becca Grady

The sky is a peachy haze of wildfire smoke as my spouse Sy and I drive west from Chicago, Illinois towards a supervolcano, an artist residency, and a glacier. We tell everyone it’s a residency-moon—part honeymoon, part artist residency. It is also an introduction to the mountains. We speed through Wisconsin, cross the Mississippi River into Minnesota, and onwards through the Badlands of South Dakota. Wind and water have whittled hoodoos and buttes over time, drawing and sculpting with sandstone, mudstone, volcanic ash, and shale. This geological strata is on display for miles. Somewhere along these highways between Wyoming and Montana the stories I tell myself begin to shift: I start paying attention.

I notice billboards and signposts. The sign reads “Devil’s Tower” but it is also Mato Tipilo, Bear Lodge in Lakota, a volcanic neck tapering up nearly a quarter of a mile in the Black Hills of Wyoming. I observe the startled expression of a twilight deer caught in headlights. The occasional unpleasantness of other people taking in our queerness while we navigate gas station restrooms and coffee lines. Icy motel pools and continental breakfasts. Where are my sunglasses? Have you seen my phone? Stop, can I take a picture of that? Babe, did you know I love you?

I love you I love you I love you. Sy tells me often. Every day. I try to reciprocate but the phrase doesn’t roll off my tongue easily. I thought these three words were reserved for mothers and special occasions. Words Mom spoke generously to my sisters and I growing up, at all the wrong times, flaring my teenage embarrassment, my eyes would roll sky high, Mommmm, as I dragged the syllable out for a month. Dad was the opposite and only told my mother when he was drunk. Years later he learned to embrace the phrase, writing I LOVE YOU in a letter from rehab scrawled with his all-caps DAD-style, and again in his first text message, iloveyou, before he learned where the space button was. Then there was the note from my ex, Leslie, in the last birthday card she ever gave me, the one I left behind in the spare bedroom when I moved out, but that I still photocopied to save as evidence because I can’t remember a single instance of her uttering this charged combination of eight letters to me. And later, in an ambulance my hand on Sy’s leg as they lay shaking on a gurney, it became a mantra, It’s going to be okay I love you it’s going to be okay I love you. 

The ambulance ride was a year ago but Sy’s symptoms linger. Sy falls asleep early and can’t drive at night, the contrast of dark and lights too chaotic to look at. On our journey west, we end driving days early, coasting into a new location during that cool space between day and night. We check into a motel, walk down Main St. and find a restaurant where Sy orders a salad—their favorite food. Before bed, Sy tells me, One more sleep. Tomorrow a volcano. 

We step out of the car at Yellowstone Lake. I breathe in and out, arch my back like a cat, roll my shoulders, stretch my calves against a rock. Yellowstone, the supervolcano this lake is named for, blew its top 631,000 years ago and the lake formed in the caldera that remains. The lake, like the supervolcano, is massive. With 141 miles of shoreline, it’s the largest lake above 7,000 feet in North America. I walk along its northern edge—a narrow sandy beach lined with pine and Douglas fir—and look across. A few islands break up the water. I see a timber lodge in the distance, along the western shore. I peel off socks and shoes, roll up my jeans and wade in. The water is frigid, even after a full summer of warming, and my toes tingle. I am standing in the aftermath of an explosion. But maybe also the before. This is not a dormant volcano. Though the chances may be slim, it could go at any moment.

Sy and I keep driving, west, then north, another hour or so, towards the cabins at Mammoth Hot Springs. We pass a vent at the side of the road where a small fumarole billows up, gasses unwilling to remain underground, dissipating into the atmosphere. All around us the ground fizzes, bubbles, and bursts. Will from Wisconsin checks us in at the front desk, hands us keys to our cabin, and we unpack the car just in time for sunset. Sy and I walk a path by the hot springs, a complex of travertine terraces on the northern edge of the park. These deposits of calcium carbonate formed over thousands of years, and in some places are more than 200 feet thick. A continuous stream of water flows, steam hovering above as the air begins to cool. Reds, oranges, and pinks reflect across the network of small pools. Here, more than anywhere I’ve ever been, the earth is unsteady. There are forces at work. Above and below. 

Author’s Note:

This is an excerpt from a larger work-in-progress book project titled A Library of Mountains which mixes memoir with environmental writing to examine the ways we acclimate to landscapes, family dynamics and relationships as well as how landscapes are acclimating to rapidly changing climates.

Becca Grady is a queer writer and artist working at the intersections of art, environmental issues and place. A former fellow and resident of the Breadloaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Tin House Workshop, Granta Nature Writing Workshop and the Pocoapoco Creative Research Residency, my writing was recently chosen in the Open Mountain Competition at the Kendal Mountain Literary Festival, and has been published in Perverse Poetry, Ecology and Action Magazine and Composite Arts Magazine. Becca holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in studio arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Becca was born in Alaska, raised in Maine, and currently lives at the southern end of the Rocky Mountains.